AI Advisory
I'm a CTO who builds production software with AI every day. I studied Economics at the University of Edinburgh and have spent my career at the intersection of commerce and technology. I help companies and investors understand what the AI transformation actually means for their business - not the conference-circuit version, but what's really happening on the ground.
The problem
Most AI strategy advice comes from people who don't use the tools themselves. The landscape moves so fast that traditional consulting timelines struggle to keep up - by the time the report lands, half the conclusions are already stale.
I think there's real value in working with someone who's in the trenches daily, building production software with these tools and seeing first-hand what's changing.
What I help with
AI adoption strategy, technical due diligence, assessing which parts of your business AI can genuinely transform (and which it can't yet), product strategy for AI-native features, and ongoing fractional CTO advisory. For investors, I help with AI due diligence on portfolio companies, understanding which SaaS businesses are genuinely vulnerable to AI disruption, and assessing AI readiness across an investment thesis. I work with you directly - no junior analysts, no sub-contractors.
My background
I've spent my career shipping large-scale enterprise software - dozens of projects used by millions of people, building and managing the engineering teams behind them. I know what it takes to build, scale, and maintain production systems, and I bring that context to every conversation about AI.
I also write a blog on AI and software economics that was ranked a Top 100 Hacker News Blog in 2025. Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, called it "a lot of great/interesting reading". It's read by teams at McKinsey, Carlyle, Evercore, Adobe, Microsoft, and PwC.
Get in touch
Email me at martinalderson@gmail.com and tell me what you're working on.